Science

Steve Fuller's Science reaches the market at a time when popular science
books have reached unprecedented popularity, and when science celebrities make TV
commercials for car companies: in the mass-market, the cachet of science has never
been stronger. For the intelligensia, Sokal and Bricmont's Intellectual
Impostures asserts organised sciences monopoly over the use of technical
metaphors, and rants against the abuse of scientific allusion. An excellent point, then,
at which to launch for coherent and informed criticism of the edifice of Western
Science.

This book is a useful and insightful journey through some of the key debates about
science as a human activity. It covers a great deal of ground: Fuller is concerned with
science as a domain of economic activity, an epistemological system, a social
institution and as a historical and cultural artifact. The broad sweep draws in - inter
alia - discussions of the science citation index, the links between science and
democracy, the development of science in Japanese and Islamic cultures and a
historical comparison between Europe and China. For all of these topics, the author is
candid about the difficulty of coming to simplistic conclusions, resisting the
temptation to cast the sequence of ideas into a too-neat overarching framework. The
book is a cascade of topics and concepts rather than a crafted linear argument, and in
this way the form reflects the content. Although deeply concerned with both
philosophy and history, Fuller is not attempting grand theory a la Popper or Kuhn.
Instead, the objective seems to be to highlight from as many angles as possible the
cultural and historical contingency of how science is practised and understood.

In such a brief book, the density of ideas becomes a little mind-boggling, and the
discussion lurches around somewhat: in a couple of pages Fuller can take the reader
from St Augustine to the Human Genome Project via Liebnitz, Voltaire, Herbert
Spencer, Herbert Simon and Paul Feyerabend. Indeed, the constant name-checking of
Great Men (usually accompanied by dates of birth and death) becomes a little
tiresome in places: sometimes rather spurious allusions seem to squeeze out the
opportunity to build a more digestible argument. Nevertheless, the extraordinary
erudition that the author displays makes the book both stimulating and
thought-provoking, and this more than compensates for any stylistic irritation.

The books key target is the view - seemingly held by many scientists - that Western
Science is natural in the sense of being beyond social critique. Fuller's arguments are
persuasive, and there is certainly a need for brief and accessible texts in this area. I
wonder, though, whether the form chosen for the book will alienate those not already
persuaded by its arguments: my suspicion is that it would be rather a difficult book for
those who would most benefit from its insights - like undergraduate scientists and
engineers, or policy makers - but who generally lack prior knowledge of the
philosophy and history of science. Despite this, the book is a useful resource and a
timely contribution.